The Rise and Fall of the Stuyvesant Floor

The floors of Stuyvesant—since their creation when the school was founded—have been subjected to more atrocities than even rowdy freshmen can commit. Sticky dried coffee, the tears of emotionally damaged people after a rejection or failed AP test, and even explosion marks from an electronic device that exploded not too long ago—these are just a few of the disasters that the floors have had to witness.

Worse yet, they barely get any payoff for the job! All they receive at the end of each day is a superficial wipe-down by the custodians. Sure, that may clean the coffee stains, but it does nothing to combat the emotional damage that the floors have accumulated throughout the day. Even the guidance counselors won’t do anything to help heal the poor floors’ emotional well-being! One would think the guidance counselors would eventually realize that the floors have feelings too, but maybe they were too busy frantically trying to change the schedules of the 60 rising sophomores in their homerooms because none of them want AP Chemistry anymore despite putting it as their first choice on their AP course selection forms.

However, nothing compares to the war crimes that the bathroom floors are victims of. Those are such unspeakable deeds that The Spectator is legally not allowed to go into detail about them here, but we’ll give a few hints: mysterious liquids on the floor, mysterious solids on the floor (particularly near the toilets), and no less than six metric tons of soiled toilet paper strewn across the floor.

The neglected floors finally voiced their concerns to the entire Stuyvesant community on the morning of April 5 by shaking up classrooms and Hudson staircase enthusiasts alike with an extremely powerful tremor! Sadly, almost none of the students noticed it at all, too absorbed in their rabbit holes of despair and AP Precalculus to realize that the floor was shaking. Of the few who did notice, most attributed it to “the freshman gym class on the sixth floor” or “Mr. Moran on his way to confiscate his 19th phone of the day.”

But the floors received a glimmer of hope when Principal Seung Yu sent out an email reminding students to respect the floors and be thankful for them for literally supporting students in their Stuy journeys.

“The floors have shown us their true power, and we can’t afford to anger them any further,” Yu later said in an interview. “4.8 is already too high of a number for most Stuy students to count to. We can’t risk the students getting more brain damage from counting up to the magnitude of an even more powerful earthquake! Oh, and I guess the fact that a higher magnitude earthquake might cause some slight damage to the school’s supports…which could result in a minor disaster that could involve the whole school collapsing.” Yu declined to respond to our further inquiries about his priorities, instead sending us to the guidance office for the brain damage that “you must have from counting past three.”

Unfortunately, none of the students took the email seriously. On April 7—the day after the email was sent—there were a record 183 coffee spills, and according to eyewitnesses, an apple from the cafeteria was even reported to be rolling up the steps of the seven-to-nine escalator. Thankfully, the apple avoided the eighth floor physics classrooms, where the violation of gravitational and frictional forces would’ve given several physics teachers heart attacks.

The floors had enough. Peace was no longer an option. Violence is never the answer but it became the question, and the answer was yes.

April 8 was a bright, sunny day. Students filed into the building as normal—completely oblivious to the deathtrap they were about to walk into. This was the floor’s time to strike. The first target? A freshman trespassing into the senior bar.

“So, for number eight, you proved triangle congruence with the ASS theorem, righ-WAAAAAAAaaa…” The student’s friend looked down at the empty void in the floor, where their friend had stood just a second ago.

The floors made their move. Shortly after, Principal Yu sent the following email, and the war began.

[ALL STUDENTS AND FACULTY] War!!!!!!

From: Seung Yu

Date: April 8

Dear Stuyvesant students and faculty,

Today marks a tragic moment for Stuyvesant, as an innocent freshman was swallowed whole by the floor in the senior bar. Maybe the floor was guarding the senior bar against trespassing non-seniors, which is perfectly understandable, but this act of violence will not be tolerated!

I command all students and faculty to arm themselves with pencils, glowsticks, chalk, and whatever else they can find. We must defend the freedom of our students!!

Sincerely,

General Yu o7 o7 o7 

Needless to say, it was a lost cause from the start. Out of the 3,600 students in the school, only seven survived the first week of the floors’ wrath, thanks to the outstanding survival training that the Stuyvesant physical education department had provided them with. Seriously, the average PACER test score for Stuy is in the negatives. How is that even possible? Those seven students were only able to survive by hiding in the janitor’s closet, where three more of them perished because they decided that eating food from an unknown source sitting in a dusty closet for an unknown amount of time was a good idea.

Sensing the impending reputational disaster that Stuy would face if Stuy kids were found to be “poorly prepared for real life” and “unable to handle a few of their classmates being traumatically kidnapped,” General Yu quickly sent a notice of surrender to the floors. “Please, we beg you to return our students to us!” the letter wrote. “We’ll give you anything! Free therapy sessions with the guidance counselors, TI-84 Plus calculators, even a bacon avocado chipotle on a roll! Heck, I’ll spend the entire school budget to buy FIVE THOUSAND bacon avocado chipotle rolls, just for you! Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease return the students that’s all I ask of you please :(”

General Yu was met with a horrific sight as he entered school in his military outfit the next day. A massive pile of papers—composed of students’ unwanted test scores and PTSD-inducing song parody project papers—was menacingly placed in front of the scanners. Several unconscious students were strewn across the floor nearby, all of them with their arms and body stuck together by hot glue from the robotics lab.A figure with the likeness of General Yu was reported to be staggering out of the bridge entrance a few hours later—his outfit stained with glue, paper, and a somewhat large piece of the SING! plaque. “I hate school,” he grumbled, before collapsing on the bridge.

Back in the supply closet, the four students were getting rather bored of eating broom handles and listening to the janitor’s Spotify playlist over and over again. So, as students do when they’re bored, they decided to do something dangerous.

“Guys, let’s watch the recording of SophFrosh SING!!”

A hideous screech rang around the school at the sound of the word “SophFrosh.” The floor rumbled with the power of a dangerously strong 4.9 magnitude earthquake, and the students saw a “ghostly figure that looked a lot like Peter Stuyvesant flying up into the sky,” as one student later recounted. Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over—the school floors returned to their normal, not-full-of-holes state. The students slowly crawled out of the supply closet as if emerging from a week-long Valorant gaming session to touch grass. “Did we…win?” one of them asked.

With the floors silenced forever and the lost students restored—they all respawned at the second floor scanners since that was their last sleeping point—the Stuyvesant community rejoiced! Underclassmen could now invade the senior atrium and bar without having to worry about the floor swallowing them up and sending them to purgatory. Faculty and Principal Yu alike exhaled a sigh of relief, knowing that their #3 spot on the Best New York Public Schools list was safe and sound. All was peaceful in the land of Stuy, save for the typical crying junior outside of their physics classroom.

However, leading AP Biology students have hypothesized that the sentient floor will return due to the theory of ecological succession following a disturbance—the disturbance here the mention of SophFrosh SING!. It remains to be seen whether this will be the case, but hey, that’s just a theory! A game theory!

Signing off from humor,

Ryan Peng o7 : (